Abstract: A variety of techniques and methods are available to evaluate cognitive performance in Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) applications. However, traditional cognitive performance evaluation techniques typically incorporate either the conscious or systematic aspect, failing to take into consideration the subconscious or intuitive aspect. This leads to incomplete measures and produces ineffective designs. In order to fill the gaps in past research, this study developed a theoretical framework to facilitate the integration of situation awareness (SA) and intuitive pattern recognition (IPR) to enhance the cognitive performance representation in USAR applications. This framework provides guidance to integrate both SA and IPR in order to evaluate the cognitive performance of the USAR responders. The application of this framework will help improve the system design.
Abstract: According to the statistics, the prevalence of congenital hearing loss in Taiwan is approximately six thousandths; furthermore, one thousandths of infants have severe hearing impairment. Hearing ability during infancy has significant impact in the development of children-s oral expressions, language maturity, cognitive performance, education ability and social behaviors in the future. Although most children born with hearing impairment have sensorineural hearing loss, almost every child more or less still retains some residual hearing. If provided with a hearing aid or cochlear implant (a bionic ear) timely in addition to hearing speech training, even severely hearing-impaired children can still learn to talk. On the other hand, those who failed to be diagnosed and thus unable to begin hearing and speech rehabilitations on a timely manner might lose an important opportunity to live a complete and healthy life. Eventually, the lack of hearing and speaking ability will affect the development of both mental and physical functions, intelligence, and social adaptability. Not only will this problem result in an irreparable regret to the hearing-impaired child for the life time, but also create a heavy burden for the family and society. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a set of computer-assisted predictive model that can accurately detect and help diagnose newborn hearing loss so that early interventions can be provided timely to eliminate waste of medical resources. This study uses information from the neonatal database of the case hospital as the subjects, adopting two different analysis methods of using support vector machine (SVM) for model predictions and using logistic regression to conduct factor screening prior to model predictions in SVM to examine the results. The results indicate that prediction accuracy is as high as 96.43% when the factors are screened and selected through logistic regression. Hence, the model constructed in this study will have real help in clinical diagnosis for the physicians and actually beneficial to the early interventions of newborn hearing impairment.
Abstract: The main objective of this study was to determine if a
minimal increase in road light level (luminance) could lead to
improved driving performance among older adults. Older, middleaged
and younger adults were tested in a driving simulator following
vision and cognitive screening. Comparisons were made for the
performance of simulated night driving under two road light
conditions (0.6 and 2.5 cd/m2). At each light level, the effects of self
reported night driving avoidance were examined along with the
vision/cognitive performance. It was found that increasing road light
level from 0.6 cd/m2 to 2.5 cd/m2 resulted in improved recognition of
signage on straight highway segments. The improvement depends on
different driver-related factors such as vision and cognitive abilities,
and confidence. On curved road sections, the results showed that
driver-s performance worsened. It is concluded that while increasing
road lighting may be helpful to older adults especially for sign
recognition, it may also result in increased driving confidence and
thus reduced attention in some driving situations.
Abstract: In this study, participants with adjustment disorder with depressed mood (aged 18-54 years) with mild depression (N=18), severe depression (N=12) were compared with healthy controls (N=20) on the Multidimensional Aptitude Battery (MAB) a cognitive performance test. Using One Way Analysis of Variance and Matched Sample t-test. The results of the analysis shows that severely depressed participants performed poorly on the cognitive performance test relative to controls, however there were no significant differences on the cognitive performance test scores between the severely depressed and the mildly depressed. In addition, performance on the non-verbal performance subtest was poorer than that of the verbal subtest, suggesting that depression affects the executive functions of the person.